Ann Althouse has a posting on the survival of languages, and speculates if the final battle will be Mandarin vs. English. My own feelings are that American-English will survive due to it's direct linkage to the alphanumerics of PC and the Internet, aligned with it's informal ability to co-opt words and phrases from almost any language without compromising it's internal structure. Mandarin (or the other variants) lack a link to an alphanumeric system with clarity.
The Pinyin-system of "Romanizing" Mandarin is not yet concise, and is an approximation. Plus there's the broader issue of a language (and it's structure) affecting the actual ways of thinking of concepts and relationships. Traditional Mandarin is non-hierarchical. You can not index and cross-index in the many ways that English allows one to alphabetize, and to numerically sequence. To categorize, to sort and to classify are methodolgies that traditional Mandarin and it's pictographic structure made quite cumbersome. This may change as Mandarin migrates to a "Romanized" written-form, but will the hierarchical conceptual organization follow...without having the Mandarin-speakers first having to "think" in English"?
